Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (2014)
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts. This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth. Scary stuff.
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Interesting and informative, but historically incorrect in its title. It was not a purely Russian program, but one based on the people and resources of much of the Soviet Union. Nothing is worse than trying to watch this with a Ukrainian wife who reacts very negatively to the title knowing many heroes came from her country and the bases were in places like Kazakhstan.